A gothic-inflected polemic that critiques the critical practices and political presumptions predo... more A gothic-inflected polemic that critiques the critical practices and political presumptions predominate within the field of Bob Dylan studies.
As Marx observed in Capital, the proponents of each one of “the chief moments of primitive accumu... more As Marx observed in Capital, the proponents of each one of “the chief moments of primitive accumulation” (i.e. “the discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the indigenous population of that continent, the beginnings of the conquest and plunder of India,” and the Atlantic slave trade) sought to justify such acts by invoking the narrative of Genesis 1-3. Recent studies by Roland Boer and Christina Petterson, Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, and David Graeber and David Wengrow, among others, have gone further, documenting an extensive pattern of engagement with Genesis 1-3 by the proponents of Western capitalist and colonial development (“Classical economic theory,” Boer and Petterson declare, “turns out to have been wrested from the Fall”). As such, argues Franco Berardi, the development of novel, more humane forms of political and economic relations depends on our ability to reclaim the Eden motif – especially the post-apocalyptic Eden depicted in Revelation – and repurpose it for liberatory ends (to usher in not a second coming of Christ, but a “second coming of Communism”). This paper argues that Berardi’s vision of a “poetic revitalization of language” designed to encourage humankind “to see and to actualize the hidden possibility” of our apocalyptic moment is embodied in the writings of Bob Dylan, whose six-decade canon is marked not only by a sustained engagement with the Eden motif (often in overtly political terms), but by lyrics designed to stimulate our “instinctive”, Eve-like ability to detect beneath capitalism’s “smooth surfaces” all the contradictions its proponents aim to conceal.
Mobility, Spatiality, and Resistance in Literary and Political Discourse, 2021
This chapter argues that Chester Himes’s nine-novel, Harlem-based detective series represents the... more This chapter argues that Chester Himes’s nine-novel, Harlem-based detective series represents the kind of “literature of combat” that Frantz Fanon defines as that which can wrest control of the narrative processes that sustain the Western capitalist/neo-colonial order, and promote the development of a “new language and a new humanity.” As with the various “Palestines” invented by the authors of the Hebrew and Christian bibles, the “Harlem” of Himes’s novels was not intended to document a present or historical reality, but to imagine a community engaged in a process of social and spatial reorganization that would encourage readers to reconceive their own reality in similarly radical terms. This chapter argues for Fanon and Himes’s writings to be viewed as models for concrete (not merely theoretical) revolutionary activity aimed at a historic reorganization of the prevailing capitalist/neo-colonial order.
A gothic-inflected polemic that critiques the critical practices and political presumptions predo... more A gothic-inflected polemic that critiques the critical practices and political presumptions predominate within the field of Bob Dylan studies.
As Marx observed in Capital, the proponents of each one of “the chief moments of primitive accumu... more As Marx observed in Capital, the proponents of each one of “the chief moments of primitive accumulation” (i.e. “the discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the indigenous population of that continent, the beginnings of the conquest and plunder of India,” and the Atlantic slave trade) sought to justify such acts by invoking the narrative of Genesis 1-3. Recent studies by Roland Boer and Christina Petterson, Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, and David Graeber and David Wengrow, among others, have gone further, documenting an extensive pattern of engagement with Genesis 1-3 by the proponents of Western capitalist and colonial development (“Classical economic theory,” Boer and Petterson declare, “turns out to have been wrested from the Fall”). As such, argues Franco Berardi, the development of novel, more humane forms of political and economic relations depends on our ability to reclaim the Eden motif – especially the post-apocalyptic Eden depicted in Revelation – and repurpose it for liberatory ends (to usher in not a second coming of Christ, but a “second coming of Communism”). This paper argues that Berardi’s vision of a “poetic revitalization of language” designed to encourage humankind “to see and to actualize the hidden possibility” of our apocalyptic moment is embodied in the writings of Bob Dylan, whose six-decade canon is marked not only by a sustained engagement with the Eden motif (often in overtly political terms), but by lyrics designed to stimulate our “instinctive”, Eve-like ability to detect beneath capitalism’s “smooth surfaces” all the contradictions its proponents aim to conceal.
Mobility, Spatiality, and Resistance in Literary and Political Discourse, 2021
This chapter argues that Chester Himes’s nine-novel, Harlem-based detective series represents the... more This chapter argues that Chester Himes’s nine-novel, Harlem-based detective series represents the kind of “literature of combat” that Frantz Fanon defines as that which can wrest control of the narrative processes that sustain the Western capitalist/neo-colonial order, and promote the development of a “new language and a new humanity.” As with the various “Palestines” invented by the authors of the Hebrew and Christian bibles, the “Harlem” of Himes’s novels was not intended to document a present or historical reality, but to imagine a community engaged in a process of social and spatial reorganization that would encourage readers to reconceive their own reality in similarly radical terms. This chapter argues for Fanon and Himes’s writings to be viewed as models for concrete (not merely theoretical) revolutionary activity aimed at a historic reorganization of the prevailing capitalist/neo-colonial order.
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